


A Lake of Ashes

by Adira_Tyree



Series: Fallout: Returning Home [4]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Caesar's Legion, Gen, Latin, Memories, Slavery, Tribals, Worldbuilding, and everything that goes with it, not particularly graphic or anything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-09 01:05:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 12,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4327941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adira_Tyree/pseuds/Adira_Tyree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vulpes Inculta might not be willing to tell you, or even do so much as remember, his past before being absorbed into the Legion - but Drusus will. He'll tell you anything, really, from his earliest memories of Tribe to his more recent excursions with Caesar's Legion. Explore these two brothers' pasts through Drusus' words, but be careful and take heed. Though his words may entice you, he is not a man to be trusted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Memories

**Author's Note:**

> This is the final part of the Returning Home series (though the others are still in progress). It isn't necessary to the main story, but helps to flesh out their world a little bit. For notes, artwork, and other juicy tidbits, check out my RH tag over [here](http://adira-tyree.tumblr.com/tagged/Fallout:%20Returning%20Home) on Tumblr.

       The edges of the Great Salt Lake were always white, stained with the salt it was named for. The water lapped at the jagged shores with a constant, steady wash, even when the shores receded back with the summer heat. All summer long the water would pull backward, leaving trails of salt like breadcrumbs to return to at the end of the late-summer rains. 

       It was always the children’s job to find the best pieces and bring them back to the village. The village itself was farther back, almost two hours walk away, on the banks of one of the rivers that fed the lake. You couldn’t live on the lake itself; the smell of the salt burned the nose like smoke.  

       Sometimes there would be trips out, in the middle of the summer, and everyone would gather all the salt they could until their hands were raw and bleeding. It ate at your hands, got in your eyes, was all you could taste for days. But it meant having meat any time of the year, and we could trade it for anything else we needed. Men and women from other tribes would walk days just to trade us for salt. 

       We were all salt miners. With picks, shovels, sticks, our hands and the heels of our boots. The walk there was dreaded; the walk back was torture. Salt dust would cake onto your skin and suck all the moisture out of you. It was easy to get dehydrated in the salt and the heat. As a treat, we would lay in the waters to take a break and try to save our skin. It didn’t really work, but it was a distraction, none the less. 

       Any other time, swimming in the lake would have been fun.  

       The elders wouldn’t let us bathe near the village afterwards, either. They would make us walk downstream to scrub the salt from our pale bodies almost as far as we’d walk to get to the lake itself. They said it kept our water pure and drinkable, but everything always tasted like salt anyway.  

       Vulpes thinks I don’t remember, but I do. I was young, but I wasn’t that young – only a few years younger than he was. I remember many things about the Great Salt Lake and the days we spent there. About the village, our parents, the elders, my friends – and his. Sometimes I look at things and remember their names in a language I do not speak. I don’t remember them unless I’m not trying to. I don’t remember how to string the words together into phrases. I don’t even know if I’m remembering them right. 

       But I remember some things.


	2. The Winter Tribe

       Every year there were certain things that happened. The salt season would rise, then the rains, then the harvests. Then about one moon after the harvest, the Southern Bears would show up. Every year, without fail. That’s just the way it happened. 

       The first time I really remember them showing up, it was the last warm day of the season, before the cold set in and froze over the surface of the river. They brought fish that year; usually they had mutfruit, but that year the rainy season had been too dry and the crop had suffered. So they brought fish. It meant there was no sweet to counter our salt.  

       Usually the mutfruit would be good for the whole winter; we could freeze them with ice cut out of the river, bury them in pre-war cold boxes in the ground. They grew wild up on Bear Lake, where the Southern Bears summered. The elders said they’d been wintering with us forever. 

       Sometimes one of our tribe would fall in love with a Southern Bear, and they’d try to live a life together. It never worked. The Salts could never leave the Lake, and the Bears could never hold still for very long. That’s how our father grew up without a father of his own. 

       He used to tell me that’s where I got my taste for travel. Vulpes never did; he was content to stay a Salter all his life. Maybe he’d listened to too many of our father’s stories. Didn’t want to travel, didn’t want a wife, didn’t want anything he wasn’t born to. All he knew or needed was the salt. 

       I used to think it must have caked onto his brain somehow. 

       Everything then was about home, our village. We shared everything; the work, the play, the goods we made and harvested and the ones we bought or bartered for. There was no concept of  _mine_  or  _yours,_ not even with the women or men. A wife was a good friend who wanted to raise children with you - it didn't mean she wasn't free to visit other men's beds. Or other women's. It was rare for anyone to stay just with one person. It wasn't expected of you either, but it made life easy when no one belonged to anyone else.  

       The Southern Bears were not like this. Our polyamorous lifestyle was strange to them, staunch monogamists that mated for life and into death after. A man and a woman could marry and one might die a day later, but the remaining one would never marry again. They didn't see death as the end to the marriage. Even to share a bed with another would be adulterous.  

       It was easy enough to avoid offending them, during the months they were with us, as they were easy enough to tell apart from our own tribe. Their curiously dark hair was silky and black, their skin pale like the salt, their eyes thin and cautious. It was said that their heritage consisted of only one ethnicity from a land across the great waters to the West, escaped from a prison during the confusion when the War broke out. It was said they were descendants of our enemies - but no one could no for sure, and it didn't matter anymore anyway. 

       They were good people. 


	3. Pinyon Nuts

       When the Legion moved into the Mojave, I was certain I'd never see anything to remind me of our home again. This place is red with sand and blood, blood that leeches into and even stains the stone. Everything is dead. A rare few plants survive, but most of our foods that aren't fresh-killed meat come to us in boxes shipped from Flagstaff on the back of brahmin and slaves. Not much can survive the journey, only things that are dried or don't need to be eaten quickly. Seeds, spices, nuts, grains. Caesar knows it is worthless to attempt to grow food for our Legion here. Anything the NCR grows turns to ash - food or otherwise.   

       But one of the foods they send us? Pinyon nuts. I remember eating them as a kid, all through the winter. Seems they grow anywhere. The cold of the North, the heat of the South. They grow them in Arizona and yet I remember Northern tribes bringing them to trade. Salt is worth its weight in gold; it meant food in the winter even in times of famine. It meant life when there was no other hope, comfort when there was little to be had.    

       Even though we gathered the nuts on our own, we always took them in trade as well. They're full of nutrients and can keep you alive and well when others are falling from simple colds brought on by winter. Roasting them was easy enough, so long as you were paying attention. Even I could roast them on my own by my 7th winter.    

       I remember one winter, when the cold was bone-deep, eating the pinyon nuts that our mother had taught us to harvest that year. It was a sticky, messy job; perfect for a 6-year-old. Vulpes hated it, of course. He was glad to know how, but would rather trade for them than have to get covered in the mess himself. He looked like an ugly, sick spine-pig, covered in pine needles and sap. That scowl didn't make him any prettier.   

       Any time I eat them now, I remember that last, late-Summer pinyon harvest with Vulpes.  I remember him as a child, covered in goo. I still laugh, and even though I don't tell him why, he still scowls.


	4. Saltwater Swimmers

       The summer after my 4th winter, mother decided that Vulpes would teach me how to swim. He was 7 then, maybe 8. It was a big responsibility, but not the first time she'd entrusted my life to the hands of my brother. At night, when our parents thought we were asleep, we heard her telling father it was good for us to learn to trust each other and work together. Father would tell her it was good, yes, but that we still shouldn't do everything alone. It wasn't until we were older that I understood why. We never really knew what _danger_ meant.  

       But we would go, Vulpes and I, at our mother's bidding. Down the river to where the water ran smooth and lazy, where we would wash ourselves at the end of the last Great Salt of the season. It was a wide area with both shallow and deep. If I stood near the edge, I would only be neck-deep. It was exciting and terrifying all at once, letting Vulpes pull me out that first time so that I was barely treading water. 

       Soon enough we were going swimming all the time. In the river, in the Great Salt Lake, abandoned pre-war docks we found when exploring. Anywhere we could find that had clean water deep enough to wade in. If we were sent to get salt from the Lake, we'd fill our baskets quickly so we could run out into the water for a swim before heading home. It burned our eyes if it splashed up onto our faces, but we still splashed each other anyway.  

       Swimming in the Lake was very different than swimming in the river - Vulpes said this was why he'd taught me in the river. On the Lake, you hardly even needed to swim. Something about the salt (the elders just called it magic) made you float so easily it was hard to touch the bottom of the lakebed even if you tried. If I'd tried that out in the river, unknowing? I probably would have drowned before I even realized what was happening. 

       The only problem with the Lake, aside from the salt, was the flies. Flies would gather along the shore in swirling black clouds that hummed as they chased you. But out over the water they all but disappeared.  

       Eventually we'd get tired and just lay back on the water and float. The salt would crust up along our necks and jawlines, leaving thick white patches that would itch later when they dried. Mother would scrub us clean with wet rags when we got home, and coat the skin with aloe so it wouldn't crack. Then we'd go right back out into the water a day or two later, and she'd do it all over again. 

       Going swimming was one of the few things Vulpes never got tired of. Even with me trailing along behind him, he'd still go every day he could. I have to wonder if he misses it, the days of lounging out in the water with no cares in the world, with the shores of Lake Mead teasing with their closeness. I haven't seen him swim in years.


	5. Hunting

       I never got to go hunting with my father. I was too young.

       Back then I was really starting to hate Vulpes. Our father always preferred him. Mother said it was just that Vulpes was older, and that meant he could do different things that I wasn’t ready for yet. Like hunting.

       The mornings when father took him hunting were the worst ones. Vulpes would get up almost silently, but the movement woke me anyway. There was no point in fighting it, father would never bring me as young as I was, so I would lay there and pretend to sleep. Lay there and stew in my own anger until the sun was high in the sky and mother would tell me to go out to play – if she was even home.

       But I didn’t want to play. Most of the children my age were girls. The younger boys were too young, and the older ones thought the same of me. Sometimes I would run all the way to the Lake or down river to swim by myself. Mother didn’t even think about me most of the time, or Vulpes really. She had other things to do than pay attention to either of us. If I spent the day at the lake, all would be well so long as I came home with little basket of salt.

       Vulpes never talked about it, his days out hunting. He would come home late, eat a simple supper and climb into bed barely having said a word to anyone. Even though he was only ten winters, he put every scrap of energy into the effort. If I teased him about it, he only shrugged. Never even threw it in my face, no sneered “see if I feed you when you’re starving because you didn’t learn to hunt.” I would have deserved it, for how much I annoyed him about it. If there was one thing I never learned with him then it was that he was the smart one and I was the reckless one.

       If father had taken us both hunting, we never would have come home with a kill.


	6. Saltwater Gnats

       Despite the Lake having been one of the biggest aspects of our life, most of us really hated it. The smell of the salt is vile, so strong it burns your lungs, and nothing can survive around the lake for very long. In the water you’ll find salt-crawlers, their segmented bodies walking aimlessly along the lake bottom in search of algae, but nothing else. Birds will swoop down and try to pluck them out of the water, but the salt is too much for them. Their corpses litter the beach covered in flies, and gnat clouds speckle it like fluttering stones.

       It is a genuinely unpleasant place to be.

       The beach is vile, though comfortably sandy. Walking out to the water is best done quickly, with your mouth _closed_. Even so, they cling to your skin, your hair. Once you’re out over the water, at least the swarms are gone. The few insects that got caught on you flit away after a moment, or crash down into the water to die. Then it’s just the smell assaulting your senses.

       Unless it’s spring.

       Something about the early part of spring that results in such heavy clouds of gnats that the Lake is almost totally inaccessible. They look like a dense, black fog out over the water and the sand – a sight you never forget. Fog over the lake in the morning is beautiful. The swarms, instead, are eerie.

       Only on those early spring days would Vulpes look with longing towards the Lake from the center of our village. Any other day that the water wasn’t frozen over, he would simply walk there. That is, until father began giving him more and more responsibilities and taking him hunting every few days. Usually the river wasn’t quite right for swimming in early spring, either too shallow or flowing too fast with winter melt. On those days it was hard for him to know what to do with himself. He couldn’t swim, he couldn’t gather salt, father hadn’t collected him up for some task for the day, and mother was nowhere in sight.

       Sometimes I would pester him, trying to entertain myself at his expense. By that age, most of the time he was already too miserable for it to be any fun. When we were younger, my jabs would lead to play fights (or sometimes real ones) that would put a smile on his face and we’d spend the rest of the day playing together. Once his 10th winter came around he would just glare at me and wander away.

       But on a few rare days, we would still walk out to the Lake together – even in wretched early spring. It was something to do, even if we couldn’t approach the Lake once we got there. Despite the bugs and the smell and the corpses, it always made him happy. Just to walk out there, sit down on the ruins of the old road and stare out at the mess that was the core of a Salter’s life was enough for him. He never thanked me for going with him, but he never asked me to stay home either.

       Somehow the memory of the Lake is still beautiful, even though the memories I have of it are vile.


	7. Eyes

       Even when we were young, people would remark on Vulpes’ eyes. Supposedly they had done so from the time he was born, but as he grew older they began to notice them more. His gaze has always been intense, much like our father’s. But the color was all our mother’s. A deep grey with just a hint of green hidden within.

       What made it interesting was the fact that I had the same grey eyes as my mother too, but neither of us had that way of looking _into_ someone that Vulpes did. So my mother and I, despite the rare color we shared with him, went unnoticed when it came to our eyes. Of course, when I spoke up, _hey I have grey eyes too you know,_ then they would notice. But it didn’t matter so much that mine were grey when they couldn’t skin you down to your bones with a look. All it ever got me was a grin and an awkward word or two.

       As a kid, this was the most annoying thing that could possibly happen. I wanted attention, I wanted them to notice _me_. And all of it was going to Vulpes, for one reason or another. He was older, smarter, quieter, better behaved, everything about him was golden somehow. One of the mornings father came to take him hunting, I asked them to bring me too – and all our father did was laugh. Vulpes, the prodigal son, and his useless younger brother, even by our father’s standards.

       For a while I thought maybe it made us seem weaker to him. Just two little boys with their mother’s eyes, probably not worth anything. I thought about it for years, even after the Legion took us. Eventually I realized he didn’t give a damn about our eyes, it was just the way he was with us.

       I remember one time I told mother about it. Told her that everyone always liked Vulpes better, about how they always ignored me – even father. She just shrugged and told me that I was a different person, and I’d just have to be happy being me. That father wasn’t trying to upset me, he just never understood what it meant to have a father say things like that to you because he grew up without one. When I whined and said that they didn’t even notice my eyes when they were staring straight into them, she told me that most people didn’t notice anyone’s eye color or remark on it. It was just the way Vulpes looked at people that made them say something.

       I’d wager her grey eyes never went totally unnoticed, though it might have been harder for her lovers to see them in the dark.


	8. The Worst Hunter in the Tribe

       The day Vulpes stood up to our father on my behalf was one of the happiest days of my childhood.

       Something must have been eating at him all day, because father never got loud at us. Even if he was an inch away from skinning our hides and boiling them for leather, he was always quiet about it. It seemed like nothing could really get a reaction out of him. Maybe that’s where Vulpes got it from, the way he can hold it in until he wants to explode – that part he learned from mother.

       The only thing that ever got him to raise his voice to us was when he was angry with me. It only happened once, though I can’t say for sure it wouldn’t have happened again if not for the Legion.

       I broke my father’s hunting bow.

       I suppose I should clear up that it wasn’t the only one he had, nor even his best or his favorite. But a bow is a hard thing to make, and expensive to trade for. It has to be made just right for the person who uses it, and little me was not the man this bow was intended for.

       The funny thing about it was that I could barely even hold it. I tried for hours and hours, but I just couldn’t get an arrow to do more than fall straight off the bow and onto the ground in front of me. So I found a place where I knew molerats nested, and I sat down to wait. After a long while, I started to see their little noses wiggling around – but I scared them away almost as quickly as they appeared. I’d forgotten that they wouldn’t just lay down and wait for me to shoot them.

       Once I realized that, I knew I had to prepare. I sat with my legs out in front of me, and hooked the bow around my feet, and notched an arrow. When I thought one of those little meals was just in the perfect spot, I pulled back on the bowstring. But, all morning I’d seen how difficult it was to get the arrow to fly. That must have meant you needed to pull back farther! So I did, I pulled farther, and farther, and farther – eventually I even remembered to pull the arrow along back with the string. I kept dropping it while I tried to pull back with both fists on the string.

       I pulled back so hard on that bowstring that I was laying almost flat on the ground, my little legs shaking with the effort of holding the wood of the bow out in front of me. Before I knew it, there was a snap, a crack, and that was the end of father’s bow. The birds scattered from above, and the molerats fled back into their holes.

       The rest was just as stupid as the first part. Though I could have left the bow out there in the woods, pretended to know nothing about it when father returned, and probably gotten away with it all unscathed, I brought the bow home. Not because I thought I could get away with it by telling my story, but because I thought, for some reason, that if I put the bow back just where it always was? Maybe he wouldn’t notice for a while.

       When father found it he was furious. At first, he was quiet as always, just staring us down, deciding just what to say. He knew it couldn’t have been Vulpes, but neither of us has a convincing alibi. Vulpes had gone to the Lake alone, though it was too early in the season to bring back any salt to show for it, and I claimed I’d been playing near the river not far from the village all day. Both quite alone all day, both unseen by anyone for several hours.

       It didn’t take long for him to press down on me for it, and I told him everything.

       I don’t remember the words that he said, but I remember the sheer terror I felt when he shouted them down into my face. I wanted to cry and scream and run all at once, but I was too afraid even to move but for my shaking.

       “Don’t you get it?” Vulpes said, moving to stand closer to me. I turned around and pressed my face into his shoulder, hugging him like I hadn’t done since I was six. “He wanted to prove he’s ready, that he’s responsible enough for you to teach him the same things you’re teaching me. He always feels left out, so he wanted to prove to you that he can do it. But since no one will show him how, he made mistakes. He just wanted to make you proud. He just wanted to make you see him.”

       Father was quiet for a long time after that. Not just for the rest of that conversation, but for a few days after. He still didn’t agree to teach me any skills, hunting or otherwise, but he never questioned what Vulpes said.

       Normally I would have been angry that Vulpes could do or say whatever he wanted and no one seemed to care. But not that time. That time I felt like the luckiest boy in the world to have such an awesome older brother.


	9. Tricksters

       There was one other child whose birthday was near mine. Her name was Natiso, named for a plant that the civilized lands call “mint.” She was just a few days younger than me and our mother often tried to convince us to play together. It wasn’t easy, considering how much we couldn’t stand each other.

       Natiso was a whiney girl, always complaining about anything she could find to upset her. The air around the Lake smelled too bad, the food was too salty, the weather was too hot or too cold, the water was too dry – anything, even if it didn’t make sense. She loved to complain, to annoy people until they did something to appease her. It was almost as bad as Vulpes’ insufferable, unintentional perfection.

       Any time we had to play together in the middle of the village, she would blame me for anything. If our little castles got knocked down, I must have pushed them over. If the molerats we were pretending to hunt noticed us, it was my fault for making so much noise. If the mud pies were burned, it was because I didn’t pay enough attention. Spending time with her was just asking for trouble. Not that I was ever asking of my own accord.

       Over the years, she got me a solid reputation as a trouble maker. Eventually, when I got tired of being blamed for things I wasn’t doing, I turned into the one she accused me of being. But that was when it all changed.

       When she started to whine or cry because I’d done something, I _would_ do something. I’d put mud in her hair, or spill her doll’s drink at our picnic, anything I could think of to genuinely upset her. And when the adults weren’t looking, too busy holding her poor little self in a hug or turned away to scold me, she would grin through her tears and wink at me.

       It became a game. I would come up with the meanest things I could, and she would have the wildest, most obscene reactions she could. And when the adults would try to separate us, saying I needed a good time out and that I should be kept away from her, Natiso would only cry louder and say they were taking her only friend away from her. It confused them, though the game was obvious enough to the other children. The elders seemed to catch on as well, laughing quietly amongst themselves from their circle, but they never said anything.

       Sometimes Vulpes would get in on the game as well, telling everyone how I had so cruelly done whatever it was I did each time. People listened to him, didn’t question is words. He was Vulpes, the boy with the grey eyes that could reach into your soul, the boy who never lied, who learned to hunt before he was even a man. If Vulpes said I’d cut off all her hair they would have believed it, even if it still hung from her head.

       Even though we never spent time together unless we were told to, Natiso was the best friend I had apart from him. We never talked about it, we never even paid attention to each other any other time. It didn’t need to be discussed. That was just all part of the game as well. If we admitted it to each other, it somehow wouldn’t have been as fun anymore.


	10. Laughter and Tears

       In our tribe, a boy became a man at the summer festival after his eleventh birthday. It was always something the children dreaded. Boys too young had to sit and watch as the oldest ones were invited to sit with the men in a circle outside the hunting tent, while they themselves were shooed away to play somewhere else. Girls yawned and rolled their eyes in grand, oversized gestures. The ceremony was not for them, so none of them were interested – at least not until their own male children were of age.

       I remember being so angry when it was my brother’s turn. Vulpes was quiet the whole day, but that was nothing out of the ordinary for him. He was always quiet, and got quieter with every passing week as that day approached. I couldn’t make sense of it. For a while I thought he just wanted to get away from me, that he saw it as an excuse to shrug off his wild younger brother.

       Mother made me watch the ceremony. “ _You may not care now, but you will someday,_ ” she said. “ _Then you’ll be glad you watched this. Your brother would do the same for you._ ” I didn’t want to. Future be damned, I didn’t want to.

       Vulpes was the only boy born to his year, meaning he was the center of attention for the whole of the festival, even more focused on than usual. I couldn’t stand watching everyone praise him while I was pushed around – play over there, watch this over here, leave your brother alone for now – all day long. By the time his ceremony finally started I was in an eight-year-old’s equivalent of agony.

       The ceremony itself is short, though the process is long. The boy’s father announces to the tribe, _as if they didn’t already know_ , that his son becomes a man this day, and everyone cheers for him as though it’s the greatest accomplishment of his life to date. One of the elders beckons him, douses him with water and then covers his chest with salt. Then it’s simply the long, mechanical process of filing his upper teeth to sharp points.

       There are six teeth to file, all along the top row. The two front teeth are merely sharpened, the four remaining are filed down to sharp points. It has to be done slowly, carefully, so they do not chip or otherwise get damaged in the process. Chips were bad omens. They were probably painful, too.

       I stared him down while the old woman filed his teeth, and I hated them both. I hated my parents, I hated everyone. The only ones who understood it were the other children, but it wasn’t as bad for them. This was _my brother_. We were always together when we were younger, but as he grew older we spent more and more time apart. Father taking him hunting had only been the beginning of it.

       Later, I snuck into the hunting tent while all the men, and now Vulpes too, gathered around the fire outside it. I did it just to spite him, so I wouldn’t have any reason to ask him what they’d talked about. So that if he wanted to tell me, I could tell him I already knew and didn’t care. They talked about women; apparently the first topic of conversation was what men and women could do together on cold winter nights to keep warm. It was boring enough for a boy my age that I nearly fell asleep.

       That night, when we were back in our beds and pretending to be asleep, he told me he kept cutting his lip on the freshly filed points of his teeth.

       “Shut up,” I muttered, and rolled over so I wouldn’t have to face him.

       But he didn’t shut up. He told me he’d been terrified. Told me that the grating of the file made his whole head vibrate, about how the filings tasted like ash in his mouth, the smell of it. Confessed to me that he thought the whole time he was going to cry from sheer terror at the _sound_ of it.

       I laughed and told him he was just being a baby. I laughed because I hated him, and the sound of the laughter covered up my tears. Because I wanted to hurt him without turning to face him.

       I laughed so loud our mother came in and scolded us for pretending to sleep.


	11. Mother and Fire

_Mpii’e_ is one of the only words I can remember reliably. _Mpii’e_ and _ku’na_. Mother and fire. The day the village burned set those two words into my mouth like scars.

       It’s strange how, even though I never felt like our mother was particularly close to us, she was still the one I screamed for when we saw the fires burning. Vulpes took my hand and pulled me from our home, out towards the middle of the village. I know he was telling me something, shaking me by the shoulders trying to make me hear him, but I couldn’t do it. I was in shock. The river was red with the blood of our elders, the mothers were being pulled into carts, the men killing and being killed, the rest of the children running everywhere like spooked rats. But all I could hear was the sound of wood burning, the inferno the claimed the village.

       It was my fault they took us. I couldn’t force myself to move, so when the foreign men came for us we were already trapped. Vulpes says he remembers the moment more vividly than any other of his life. When the man with the deep voice and the black vest told us we were to come with him, where we would learn to be real men under the rule of Caesar. Our lands, our goods, and our people were now claimed by his hand in the sacred name of God.

       We later learned that God was Mars, and that we were lucky to be able to dedicate our lives to him. That we would learn his art of war to make a better world for all.

       For a long time, all I could remember was the sound of the fires burning, and the face of my mother when they took her.

       The fire and our mother.

       Ku’na and mpii’e.


	12. We are Legion

       It was barely even a day before our Legion indoctrination began. We started with simple things: the way we greet each other is with _ave_ or _salve_ , or _salvete_ if we’re addressing multiple persons. For close friends, the informal _heus_ is acceptable – but only when off-duty. Our leader, who was not with us at the time we were captured, was _Caesar_ , and he was the son of a god named _Mars_. Mars was the one who had cleaned the earth with fire and blood, so that his son could go forth and unite all people under one banner – the banner of Mars, the banner of _Legion_.

       There was quickly a lot of practice with _salvete_. There were many of us, though none older than Vulpes. I think it’s always bothered him in some way that he was grouped in with the rest of us children, while ‘men’ only a few years older were killed along with the adult males of our tribe – but it gave him purpose like nothing ever had. He’d taken so strongly to the life of a Salter before, not wanting anything different or extra. The Legion was like a rebirth for him.

       But I’m getting ahead of myself there.

       At first, he hated it. Hated the Legion, hated the men in it, hated what it stood for. Especially hated the man with the deep, commanding voice that stripped us of everything we had been all our lives – but from what I gathered, that last hate never changed. It’s a miracle he survived even getting to Flagstaff, let alone our training.

       Then on the other hand, there was me. For the first time in my life I felt like someone saw my value, my potential. I was still a stupid, eight-year-old boy, but I was a stupid eight-year-old boy that was being taught and trained and given real tasks to perform nearly every waking moment of his life. Gone were the days where I would spend hours to decide whether to go to the river alone or get mud in Natiso’s braids, just to make the day a little shorter. There was work to be done.

       Those first few days of traveling were worse for Vulpes. His idol, our father, was dead or dying back on a cross in the charred husk of our village. We didn’t know what happened to mother. The bow Vulpes had been making for himself was surely destroyed, and even if it wasn’t he wouldn’t be going back for it ever again. I tried to convince him it would be an adventure, something new and exciting, but he wouldn’t speak. Not even to me.

       For several weeks we were traveling. From what we could tell, the Legion was looping the Lake, still heading north on the east side. We assumed that they either had yet to strike or were avoiding entirely New Caanan to the East of our village, as they hugged so close to the Lake that many of the Legion men were getting sick from the salt-stench. In the days after taking us, they hit the village of spine-pig breeders, the Water Birds, an isolated tribe we had only ever heard rumors of living on the Bear River, and 5 other tribes we had never met before. Once their loop of the Lake was completed, they journeyed south to Flagstaff without stopping.

       It was a prosperous journey for the Legion. They acquired over 40 male children to train, and I can’t even begin to guess how many females. By the time we were in Flagstaff, we were already speaking numerous English and Latin phrases – courtesy of the man in the black vest. It was enough to communicate with, and we were young enough to catch on fast. By our second day there we were settled into a new training camp and given our first machetes. There were no practice swords – any boy who got himself killed during training wasn’t worth his salt to the Legion anyway.

       In all the excitement it was easy to forget our lives had just been destroyed in front of our own eyes. I didn’t really ever miss our father, he hadn’t left me much to miss. Mother I missed simply because she was our mother, but I think I missed the concept of Mother more than the actual woman. It took Vulpes several years to get over either. He doesn’t forget things easily, he never has.


	13. The Language Barrier

       There was this wall in each of the training camps. If you used your words wrong, in English or in Latin, or spoke in your old tribal language, you'd stand up against that wall and older boys would get to practice whipping a real body. They called it the Language Barrier - like it was some great joke to them. The wounds weren't deep, and they healed quickly and didn't scar, but it was enough to make you try harder. To make you actively want not to fuck up.

       Unfortunately for me, I was never good with language.

       Vulpes, if I can correctly recall, caught on to both languages so fast that our teachers would tell us to try to live up to his example. Of course, being told to live up to my brother’s example, even after having escaped our village, only made me want to be as least like him as possible. That didn’t help my natural linguistic inabilities.

       By the time we graduated out of our basic language instruction, Vulpes was already helping teach the struggling students in the class. And I was already learning how to be numb to the sting of a whip.

       That made the next levels of instruction much, much easier. We were given a small array of weapons (including whips) and told _learn how to use them_. For the first few days, we weren’t even given instruction, simply free reign over a field of training dummies. I didn’t question it when Vulpes simply took his machete and disappeared for each of those first few days. At the end of it, our instructor had obviously noticed.

_Show me what you have learned,_ the man said with a cruel grin, _in your time wandering the camp. Perhaps a better use of it would have been to do the same as your peers and practice._ When Vulpes displayed several of the different tactics used by adult legionaries, the man understood – as did the rest of us. While we were attacking our dummies with little-to-no knowledge of the art at all, Vulpes had gone off to observe the skills of others, then practiced it on his own afterward.

       It was this man who gave Vulpes his name – the cunning novice. Untrained, unskilled, but smarter than the rest of us. The Rough Fox, Vulpes Inculta.


	14. Eagle Eyes on the Water

       Slowly, the boys became men, and the men became named men. I was given my name finally, after years of simply being _boy_ or _puer_. Named for my love of water and skill in finding it even in the desert. Drusus. Dew-Watered. Thankfully, it wasn’t a truly Latin name, so few knew its true meaning. It wasn’t quite an ideal name. Most were named for their strengths or gifts for battle, like Vulpes for his cunning. Eolus for his speed, Galenus who never turned to fear, and Aetius the eagle who could see far beyond the horizon.

       Aetius was assigned the bunk across from me when we graduated to full recruit status. Vulpes, being older, had already been given a bunk in a different area of the camp. I saw him less and less frequently. But Aetius was quiet and willing to listen when I complained. Better, he was able to talk me out of my pranks, and offered solid alibis on the occasions when I went through with them anyway. He was eerily similar to Natiso from my childhood, only without the constant whining. Always quietly amused. No one would have expected him to even have a sense of humor, he was always so silent and serious.

       I still couldn’t seem to stop caring about outdoing my brother. Vulpes was powerful in the camp for someone his age, well known and respected by men both his junior and his senior. But he didn’t have many friends. He was rarely seen speaking to others, instead preferring to train or practice his languages, sometimes both at once – taunting practice dummies in long strings of Latin or English, it didn’t matter which. No one dared tease him for it. They saw how well he was using the machete in his hands.

       There were occasions when I was able to find him and upset him, though. He knew I was doing it on purpose, trying to piss him off, but it was just too easy. It was the only time Aetius never stepped in – Eagle Eyes was too smart to get into that one.

       That isn’t to say though that he didn’t risk his neck for mine more often than he should have. One time, when staying with our camp for a month, the Legate was trying to find out who managed to put the entire corpse of a Lake Lurk into his bed without anyone noticing. Of course, I had no idea. I would never have dreamed of such a fantastic prank. I certainly couldn’t have pulled it off, at least not alone.

       All the eyes were looking at me, but there was absolutely no way I’d gotten that thing in there. I’d been training with Aetius the whole day, and the Legate had been away from his tent for less than an hour that afternoon. Vulpes had a complicated question about Latin composition. It was, obviously, pure chance that his interests happened to coincide perfectly with the plans the rest of us had come up with. Besides, the Legate had only asked if we had put it there – and we hadn’t.

       I didn’t feel the need to mention though that I may have been responsible for lurk’s the wig. And the lingerie? That was entirely the Eagle’s idea.


	15. Decanus Vulpes

When Vulpes was made a Decanus, I was just barely 14. I’d been a graduated recruit for all of a year. It meant that while I would be running around on shorter missions under my own Decanus in the area surrounding Flagstaff, Vulpes would be going off hunting tribes with his Centurion. The rumor was that they were heading East into New Mexico. There was no way we could know for sure; we weren’t important enough to be told.

       I didn’t really care that he was going on adventures when I wasn’t. It was just the principle of the thing. I was tired of always being one step, two, three steps behind Vulpes in everything we would ever do.

       After his promotion, the first thing I did was congratulate him. He was still my brother, after all. I was proud of him, even if it did piss me right the fuck off that he’d done it. If I wasn’t so concerned about how he was suddenly my superior, I probably would have decked him right then and there. But the proper thing was to tell him this news was fantastic and amazing, and tell him I was happy for him – so I did all that first. _Then_ I decked him.

       Luckily enough, no one was around to witness it, because there probably would have been some nasty repercussions. Vulpes didn’t really care, he understood it, even if it did annoy him. But I had to do it, and he knew why.

       What really shocked me was his response.

       “ _Should I take this to mean that you’ll reject my offer? Or would you like to join my company? I’ve been allowed to pick my own recruits._ ”

       I was sorely tempted to punch him again, but Vulpes wasn’t the sort to tease me with lies. Pranks were my business, not his.

       Part of me was angry. I didn’t want to leave Flagstaff, really. It was comfortable, I had my free range of activities to amuse myself with, the NCR with their apathetic government and trigger-happy military was far to the West and out of even Aetius’ sight. I didn’t want my brother to be giving me true commands that I had to follow. I didn’t want to risk my life for a Legion I didn’t really give a damn about.

       But the clay walls, the wide streets, the smells of fresh meals and of too-healthy brahmin, it was all starting to be just a little too normal. It had been more than five years since the Legion had come for us, up by the edges of the Great Salt Lake, and I could feel the change coming. I had been eight-years-old when they had taken us, and I couldn’t help but wonder if by the time another eight years had passed we would be taken again to another land by Caesar and his men.

       I took my time to answer him. Despite the lackluster conditions we lived in, the life of a recruit wasn’t too bad. There was a tent over our heads and pillows under them, three large meals a day to keep us healthy, no need to worry about finding a way to live in the harshness of the wastes. The Legion provided for us, and even if I didn’t care about the politics, it was easy enough to see that they gave us everything we needed.

       But there was talk of war, real war, escalating soon. Caesar wanted to take a great city for himself, not just simple tribes and villages like he had been. To say that he was conqueror of 86 tribes was to strike terror into our enemies’ hearts, yes. But how would that compare to fighting the NCR to the West, or the Brotherhood to the East?

       I hadn’t really expected to live all that long in the first place anyway.


	16. Marching into Death

       Following Vulpes was one of the most terrifying things I’d ever done. As a Decanus, he was brash, taking opportunities as he saw them. In camp, he would plan for every contingency and prepare his troops for the worst. Then battles were likely to go better than he’d planned for, and morale stayed high. He was a strong leader, even back then. Rumor was that he was a prime candidate to make Centurion someday.

       But he had one flaw that would not work in Caesar’s Legion. Genius.

       He was a bit of an idiot, in that respect. It wasn’t wise to defy your Centurion just because you thought you had a better idea than they did. And Vulpes did just that. Sure, we were victorious. It was easy to break rank and cut into the opening. The ten of us all followed Vulpes with pride; he’d chosen his men well.

       Upon our return to Flagstaff, Vulpes was publicly displayed to show what happened when a man disobeyed. Watching my brother whipped in the main training grounds as a precursor to his crucifixion was… I do not have words. I was fifteen and about to watch my brother die one of the worst deaths I could imagine.

       The horror then was more real than when the Legion came for us when we were children – an event I’d largely blocked from my mind. I remembered the corpses of mothers and fathers, the bodies piled high and the living screaming from their crosses. The thought that they would on that day put another of my tribe up on a cross to die made my blood boil – but every slash of the whip against his back made it run cold as well.

       Eighty – one for each man in our centuria.

       Sixteen – one more for each Decanus.

       Twenty-Four – one for each Centurion, including our own, of our training camp.

       One for each head of staff – Peregrinus the Scoutmaster, Cerberus of the Frumentarii, Argus the Master of Hounds, Lucius of the Praetorianii.

       One for the Legate.

       One final more for Caesar.

       The total made for one hundred and twenty six, one for each man he directly betrayed by his disobedience. It was a lesson. Not so much for Vulpes, as he would not live to learn it. But a lesson for the rest of us. For everyone at Flagstaff.

       When they marched him towards the crosses lining the front of our training fort, I decided right then and there that I was deserting. They had taken my way of life, my mother and my father, and I had forgiven them, even thanked them for it. But taking my brother was more than I would bear and do their bidding.

       To the amazement of all, Caesar himself greeted us there. Caesar did not live at our camp, and when he wanted to speak to someone _he did not go to them._ No one really even knew exactly how to respond to his arrival. Were we supposed to greet him in any particular way? Were we even supposed to greet him at all? Our camp was a young camp, and we had not been prepared for this. Most of us recruits had never seen him ourselves. We were not yet valued enough as soldiers to be sent in his cohort. Even going on missions within a centuria had been a rare event.

       After a few words, it wasn’t Vulpes that was going up on the cross after all. Instead, Vulpes would be joining the Frumentarii, under the command of Cerberus. He commanded less than thirty men, and none as young as Vulpes. Some of us wondered if Caesar hadn’t simply used the event as a way to get rid of a Centurion he disliked, but it didn’t matter. If Vulpes lived, he would be a Frumentarius Recruit, the youngest the Legion had ever seen.

       I couldn’t even bring myself to be mad at him for it. The dirt was stained red with his blood for days.


	17. Cerberus

       They called him Cerberus not because of his skill in battle, nor for his build and appearance, but for the fact that he had eyes watching every direction at once. He may as well have had three heads watching out for his body, he was the best Frumentarius the Legion had trained up until that point. And Vulpes was going to have to kill him to take his place. But Cerberus did not, in fact, have three heads, only one – and it was mortal.

       Still, he was imposing. He was tall, dark skinned and leathery, with bulging muscles that boasted his unarmed combat abilities. The stark whites of his eyes stared out at the world in such a way that it seemed to shrink back from him in terror. But he was old, too old to be left in the job for very long. And the longer Vulpes waited, the more likely he was to lose his chance at fighting him.

       Cerberus was not the first head of the Frumentarii. Before him had been Methodius, a meticulous one whom had founded the branch under Caesar’s orders. He led the group for about eight years, and was killed and replaced by Cerberus. When he had taken over, Cerburus was already thirty-five. Now he was fifty-one, and the only man left in the Legion who was older than Caesar.

       It was time for him to be replaced.

       I wasn’t entirely convinced by Vulpes’ plan, but he refused to be shaken on it. Why he wanted to replace him, I’ll never know. If he could, it would mean great things for both of us, and our friends as well. If not, it wouldn’t really matter to him, as he would be dead.

       The only way to replace the head of the Frumentarii is to kill the head of the Frumentarii. You don’t even need to be one to do it, if you read the concerning laws closely. It would be stupid to enter in such a way however, and you would likely be replaced yourself almost instantly.

       And for Vulpes to be taking him on having never fought him before was insane. Most of the Frumentarii came from two categories – ones who had faced Cerberus and survived in single combat for as long as he saw fit, and ones whom he had hand-picked from the recruits. Vulpes had been hand-picked by _Caesar_ , and thus had never faced off against Cerberus.

       Vulpes had decided that the only way to come out on top if he won the fight would be to fight him fair and square in the arena, offering him a full challenge – fist to fist in light armor. The law stated that Vulpes could kill him in any way, as killing him by catching him off guard proved Cerberus was no longer worthy of his place. By facing him in an arena fight instead, it would show that Vulpes felt he was able to beat the man in a fair fight. Cerberus knew everything there was to know about each of his recruits, and would know the exact fighting styles Vulpes would fall back on, all his weaknesses – the long-healed gash on his arm that still ached, the tender spots on his back, the place at his neck that would only serve to excite him. He also knew human anatomy inside out.

       Cerberus never liked Vulpes. Maybe it was just that he hadn’t joined in the proper way, but something about Vulpes always put him in a terrible mood. I heard about it from several of the men; but he didn’t punish Vulpes for it. It wasn’t wise to reject a favorite of Caesar, even a young one of no noteworthy rank. It was obvious they didn’t get along, but they understood one another at least, and that was something.

       But not punishing Vulpes was like giving a damp rag to a man dying of thirst. He was cruel to his men, and he was cruel to his prisoners. His style was usually to find someone of low value to the NCR who happened to know valuable information and make them go missing. On the books, he was clever about it.

_“Trooper #16593 granted extended leave on 9/7/2276 to care for sick mother.”_

_“Trooper #14992 discharged with honors on 2/5/2273 as only living relative of an NCR citizen minor.”_

_“Trooper #10043 discharged without honors on 7/30/2277 for fatally assaulting a superior officer.”_

       Anything that could be overlooked in a world torn by war – which is pretty much anything. Most were thrilled by their discharges and unexpected leaves, all too happy to get back home to their comfortable little NCR homes and families or just to book it until they found somewhere an official wouldn’t recognize them. It made them even easier prey.

       He had a habit of torturing them in particularly “creative” ways to get information, and of making one or two of his men watch and assist. The thought in his mind was that any of his men would potentially replace him someday, and these were skills that could only be taught in practice. Some of the Frumentarii took to it. Some didn’t. The ones that did were the first ones to be sent on particularly dangerous or far-away missions when Vulpes eventually took Cerberus’ place. It didn’t bother him if they didn’t come back; they were just a little too damaged to be predictable.

       It wasn’t too long before it was down to the men he really wanted to work with. Vulpes kept a small crew, compared to the hundred or so men Cerberus used. The Fox’s Frumentarii were few, but specialized – and mostly men of our own old training camp.

       Unsurprisingly, he took Aetius, my old friend with the eagle eyes and easy lies. He went several places, anywhere a silver tongue and sharp sight could come in handy. I remained largely at the Fort working as Vulpes’ second in command, with Galenus working directly under me. It was our job to make the men able to blend in as whatever they needed to be - troopers, tribals, peasants.

       A detachment went to Freeside just to sit and listen for anything interesting, including Lycaon, Ferox, Cyrus, Hades, and Titus. Daedalus and Cato managed to get in as engineers at Hoover Dam, but no one else ever made it past NCR’s security on the site. There was also Alerio on the Strip, Pliny on the radios, and Cassio at Searchlight, and poor Cassiel got to use his strong legs to be a runner for Caesar himself.

       The few that remained were some of Cerberus’ old men. Ulysses continued to work as a courier, though he rarely reported in, along with Eolus Major. Karl worked mostly with larger tribes to convert whole sects in large batches. Picus had been working his way up in the ranks at McCarran for years, and Vulpes saw no reason to recall him. Cassius and Nemo managed well together in the NCR for many years more, and Icarus managed to work his way into a General’s office eventually.

       Vulpes wasn’t sure how many more of Cerberus’s men existed in the NCR, but none more reported in once word of the man’s death spread. It was likely that at least a few defected. When they heard that their leader had died to the Fox – lean and thin where Cerberus was all brute muscle, and young and inexperienced to boot – they would have assumed their Legion was heading rapidly towards destruction.

       But Vulpes didn’t come out of the battle unscathed. A near pulverized thigh and a shattered shoulder would have left him crippled for life had Caesar not seen to his care with the precious auto-doc. It was one of the only times I’d seen Caesar in person, when I carried Vulpes up to the Imperator’s tent, wondering if he would die. Vulpes only remembers my carrying him, and later waking up in his new tent with me passed out by his side.

       When he assumed I’d somehow nursed him back to health, I saw no trouble in letting him. I thanked Caesar for him, explaining he did not wish his new men to see Caesar bestowing such favors upon him so soon, for fear they would not be as loyal as they could. Caesar agreed, and the topic was never broached again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if this got a little too Illiad Book 2 in there, what with listing so many people, but these men are important to Drusus. He doesn't care so much that they're soldiers working together, but they're his friends. He's grown up with these men, AND been through hell with them to boot. As for the fight with Cerberus? Vulpes survived, that's the part he remembers best.


	18. Fire and Hate

       I really wasn’t sure what Vulpes saw in his new wife. She was fire and hate and full of the wildness that comes with tribe, everything that Vulpes shouldn’t want in a life companion. But then, who said anything about for life? Even in the days of our own tribe, a wife wasn’t quite a woman to spend your life beside. And here, in the Legion? Nothing close. A wife was a woman to bear your children, if you were considered valuable enough to even have one.

       The vast majority of children born were born out of quick fucks wherever it was most convenient. None of the children born of those unions were kept by their mothers, but rather were taken by the priestesses to be raised into soldiers. Any female children born were used as more immediate resources – food for the dogs and as tiny corpses to decorate villages we conquered. There simply weren’t enough resources to ship them back to Flagstaff one-by-one, and it didn’t make sense to have little girls at the Fort.

       Vulpes didn’t ask for this woman, though. She was a gift, chosen for him by Caesar to bear him fearsome little sons. Anything born of that woman was sure to be ferocious. That woman was little more than a feral animal, with claws and teeth reaching for Vulpes’ throat. I avoided her, for the most part. Sure she was beautiful, but she was a dangerous little thing. It wasn’t that I was afraid of her; it was that I was afraid of what I might do to her.

       He had an unexplainable patience with her, though even he would break from time to time. When she cut that slit into his cheek I was certain he would kill her, after only having had her for two months, but he took it as a lesson and held her at arm’s length from there on out. (Excepting in certain situations, of course.)

       Sylva. Forest. They said she’d been taken from the far north, though it was anyone’s guess just how far. Bands of Legion men stretched out in all directions like fingers, reaching and reaching farther until they could go no further. These bands would routinely send collected women and children back to Flagstaff, and no records were kept of where individuals came from. She could have been from southern Utah or she could have been from Old Montana and no one would have known.

       On the rare occasions I saw her, she tended not to speak to me. From what I could tell she spoke to almost no one anyway, except for Europa – Vulpes’ original slave woman. He’d purchased her not long after joining the Frumentarii, and Petrus he inherited from Cerberus along with the tent. Petrus, being mute, wasn’t good conversation for anyone. But Europa would whisper back and forth with her. There was no knowing what they talked about, but we guessed it was largely about Vulpes, and of Sylva’s old days in her tribe.

       Vulpes had no interest in her tribe. He had no interest in _any_ tribe. In fact he generally tried to pretend they didn’t exist at all. Tribes were just some distant memory to him, an ancient history that no longer existed and was painful to think about. He’d blocked out the home instead of his people, and I’d blocked out the people instead of my home. If I didn’t think he’d skin me for mentioning it, I probably would have loved talking to her about the Salts and the Southern Bears, the New Canaanites to the east, the Tar Walkers to the South. Maybe she’d walked through the ruins of our home.

       She reminded me that there was more to life than Legion – something Vulpes constantly worked to help me forget.


	19. Daughters and Sons

       Having spent all of my life being second to everything, always one step behind my brother, I never expected to have a son before him. Any children at all, really. I had no woman. Sylva had born her girl and Vulpes had taken the child away to die, and only weeks later a slave not moments after giving birth to a son comes running into my tent and claims it is my own.

       I have heard women beg, plead, making sobbing wrecks of themselves, trying to convince a man to claim her son so that he might stay with her in the Fort. Never until that moment when she came into my tent, sweaty and blood-soaked with labor, did I hear a woman _tell_ a man that her babe was his own son. It wasn’t a question. She knew it, she showed me the child, and she sat down in the corner of my tent to calm the screaming raven of a boy she held.

       It wasn’t entirely unlikely, either. She was a particular favorite of mine, and that was known by many. Few others approached her, either out of fear or respect for me. Unspoken claims were the law on the open women, who were available to all men until bought outright. This was most often done when a woman bore a man a son, and convinced him to claim it.

       The idea of beating Vulpes to something, especially to something so important to him? Not something I could easily pass up.

       I sent word and payment to Canyon Runner within the hour.

       It was cruel and petty of me. And I didn’t care.


	20. Refraction

       Attacked like dogs. The men, women, children at Bitter Springs weren’t worth keeping an eye on the way Vulpes insisted. If any man had been the right one for the job, it probably _had_ been Aetius. But were they really worth dying for? The Legion had better things to do than look after drug addicts, even if they were superb at unarmed combat.

       After nearly dying to Cerberus in the arena, Vulpes had become obsessed with unarmed combat. His skill for it wasn’t quite what he wanted it to be, and the Khans were known to be brutal warriors when it came to such tactics. Their own training was the only we’d encountered that was even nearly as rigorous and brutal as our own – many did not survive it. Vulpes wanted to take their tribe into the Legion without losing that valuable asset, and so convinced Caesar to allow him take them in his own way. Through words and cunning. Fox work.

       His fox work ended in Aetius’ death.

       I didn’t want to blame Vulpes for it; it was the NCR dogs insisting on fighting a pack of women, children, and the elderly. Khan women weren’t something to tamper with, but up against NCR 1st Recon snipers? Fists don’t do much against them, and by the time they would have known what was happening it would have been too late.

       I didn’t want to blame Vulpes for it. I didn’t want to blame Vulpes for it like I didn’t want to blame him for our father not taking us both hunting together as children. But just like when his teeth were filed, I did it anyway. I hated him for it. I hated every word that came out of his miserable mouth about it, every time he said no one needed to go out there and take his place. The NCR turned it into a base of their own, it could have been useful to have at least someone there to listen to what they were up to. But he said no, again and again and again.

       In truth, I didn’t want to go to take his place. I wanted to go to bury him. He’d been the best friend I’d had in the whole wretched place, and he’d died fighting for Vulpes obsession with the Legion.

       He couldn’t have stopped me if he’d chained me to the center beam of his own tent.


	21. To Die Alone in Silence

       Talking to Vulpes through the radio that last time had been… painful. What turned out to be more painful was the conversation with Pliny only moments later.  
I could only assume Vulpes had left, and Pliny felt he could speak freely.

       “Fox hole here, you still there Field?”

       He explained that a few of the other Frumentarii had heard of what I’d set out to do despite Vulpes’ orders against it, and they’d come up with a plan.

       When I returned to the Fort, I would be crucified for my actions. It was a slow, painful death, standing as long as I could and then slowly suffocating under the weight of my own body pressing in on my lungs. I might die of dehydration first, before true exhaustion set in, but there was no way to know. It was the easiest way to make an example of someone, a common form of execution. A vile one.

       But the rest of Vulpes’ men had other plans for me.

       A group of NCR soldiers had recently been captured. One of them would replace me on a cross, so long as I came back on a night with no moon. It meant I would have to find somewhere to delay for several days without any Legion men noticing, but it was possible. I’d spent many a night in the desert alone, a few more wouldn’t kill me.

       Most importantly, it would mean I wouldn’t die.

       It turned out that that one brief exchange on the radio would be the last time I would talk to Vulpes. He couldn’t know what the men had done for me. He’d never know I hadn’t died. When I did finally return to the Fort, Vulpes was gone. Away on some mission to find a courier that somehow wasn’t one of our own, a personal favor for Caesar. I never saw him before I “died.”

       It seemed like revenge enough.

       After I was pulled down and replaced with the unconscious NCR man, I was given civilian clothing and a mask to cover my face. I stayed with Cyrus put in a good word about me with the Kings, and so I was largely left alone when I arrived. I moved into Westside, where no one ever wanted to be. Not even Vulpes ventured there, nor did his men.

       To my surprise, I wasn’t the only ex-Legion man there. We formed a community among ourselves, though we never spoke of our pasts. We became the men we were born, shedding the Legion like a skin we no longer needed. We kept tabs on the war, on the Legion itself, occasionally listened in to Pliny’s radio broadcasts to hear what the Frumentarii were up to, but the codes changed eventually, new men joined and old ones died.

       I stopped listening after a few years. I couldn’t remember what any of it meant. A few things stood out on occasion, but mostly it was like trying to remember my old language of the Salters.

_Fire_ and _Mother_ ; _Frumentarius_ and _Brother_.


End file.
